Player One Ready! Life-Sized Pac-Man

So last summer we had way too much fun with Life-Sized Angry Birds, so this summer we decided to bring another digital game into the real world. In a word, the results were AWESOME!

Set-Up

Look up Pac-Man on your favorite search engine, and you'll get quite a few screen shots of the classic video game mazes. I used construction paper to lay out the maze as I was short on time, but if you wanted to be technical about it, you could grab some masking and measuring tape and go crazy!

We used a whole bunch of die-cut circles for the dots, but you could use plastic coins, LEGO pieces, or any other small item that you have in copious amounts. 

GamePlay

Select one player as Pac-Man (or Mrs. Pac-Man as the case may be), and two players as ghosts. Assure the rest of your participants that everyone will have a chance to play both parts. We gave each player one minute in the maze to pick up as many dots as they could. The ghosts had to stay in their center starting position for ten seconds, and then they could start giving chase. Typically speaking, the ghosts had to walk backwards or step heal-to-toe to slow them down a little bit. The round ended when the time ran out, or Pac-Man (or Mrs. Pac-Man), was tagged by one of the ghosts. 

The key to everyone participating was rotation. All of the participants started in a line, and the first participant was Player One and the second and third participants were the ghosts. When Pac-Man (or Mrs. Pac-Man) was tagged, they went to the end of the line, and the first ghost became Player One, the second ghost became first ghost, and so on and so on until everyone had a turn to play each part. 

When each round ended, the two ghosts would reset the maze by replacing the dots that Pac-Man (or Mrs. Pac-Man) had collected, and the game would begin again. 

Extras

Keep a High Score Board with each participant's name.

Find some Pac-Man sounds and have them playing while the rounds are happening.

Consider a way to have Pac-Man (or Mrs. Pac-Man) grab that power-up that allows them to eat the ghosts for extra points. Maybe have a ball they can grab that lets them tag the ghosts and send them back to their starting location. After a certain amount of time, they'll have to surrender the ball. 

Life-Sized Angry Birds: A Video Game Comes to Life!!

Has anyone ever played Angry Birds? Rhetorical question, right? lol. But, have you ever tried Life-Sized Angry Birds?? Its a ton of fun, just like the digital counterpart, and I'd like to thank Morgan and Lucy at the Community Library Network at Post Falls for suggesting it =D

What you'll need:

• Slinghot 
• Plush Angry Birds
• Cardboard Boxes, Oatmeal Containers, etc.
• Optional: Green balloons with painted pig faces

The slingshot that we used was a three-person water balloon launcher. The larger slingshot was perfect for the plush angry birds that we had found.

The library goes through a lot of cardboard boxes as we send and receive books and such, so we just grabbed a few that we had and set them back up. We also found random things like oatmeal containers, and my boss's husband used to work at a Styrofoam plant, and he gave us some of the leftover pieces.

I divided our participants into two teams. One team would build a structure, the other team would knock it down, and then we would switch. Words of the wise; give the team building the structure a set time limit, and possibly have a minute to two-minute game that the other team can play while they wait (or maybe have some questions like, "what have you been reading this summer?").

A big part of the Angry Birds game is obviously the points, but I couldn't figure out a legit way to make that happen in real life. But, if you do, let me know. While we didn't have points, the kids had a great time building things up and knocking them down.

Library Teen Film Fest: 5 Promotional Things To Try

1. Find out if your local schools have video production classes, and promote to those students directly. Most likely, these students will be excited about participating, and will have the necessary equipment too.

2. Ask a video production company to offer an internship or a day pass to the creator of the top film.

3. Create a promo video (this one was from last year).

4. Include a Public Service Announcement category, and send the winner to the CSLP Video Challenge (The Collaborative Summer Library Program has teens from across the nation submit PSAs, and then uses them to promote summer reading).

5. See what other film fests do. Obviously there are the big film festivals like Sundance and Toronto, but there are also many libraries (Yorba Linda, Houston, Topeka and Shawnee, and Greenwood for instance) that have done film fests before. Each one of them does it a little bit different, but they are definitely worth checking out.

Next Week

I'm going to chat about cool things you can do at the film showing event, or as we like to call it, The Red Carpet Event (because who doesn't want to see their project on a big screen?).

Library Teen Film Fest: How Ours Works

So here comes a combination of a program idea and shameless self-promotion. For the past four years, we've held a Library Teen Film Fest, and this year, I'm going to tell you a little bit about how we do it.

Basically, teens (ages 13-18) create a video using a theme (typically the Summer Reading theme for that year), and then we show the films at the library and give out cash prizes.

This year, the videos will all be Short Films (up to five minutes long), created around the theme, "Beneath the Surface." Once the films are created, we have teens fill out an entry form, and upload their video to our YouTube Channel.

The first year we held the festival, we allowed participants to submit on YouTube by giving us a link to their video, or giving us a DVD. But, we found it was difficult to promote these videos on social media, and also made the Red Carpet Event (where we show the films) not go as smoothly as we would like.

Now, when a participant enters the competition, they are given the username and password for our Film Fest YouTube Channel to upload their video. This allows us to keep the videos all in one place, and makes setting up the Red Carpet Event much easier.

While I've found most teens who enter the competition would have done so anyways, it never hurts to have some incentives. We ask our Friends of the Community Library Network group for funds to offer snacks, refreshments, and cash prizes.

Well that's about enough for this post, but I'll be writing next Monday about ways to make the Film Fest work better (sometimes you got to learn the hard way lol, and sometimes there are ideas that you just can't quite implement that might work for others).

Book Fair of Death: Murder Mystery

One of the final High School programs that we did over the summer was a Murder Mystery Night. It was called Book Fair of Death, and it gave participants a chance to take on a role, and solve a mystery.

Emily Thornton was supposed to appear at a book fair and author signing at the Hayden Library, but just hours before the event, she was found dead! But, don't worry. Detective Bibliophile is on the scene, and he is going to get to the bottom of it...with a little help from the program participants.

Ultimately I got the idea and the majority of how to run this program from the Collaborative Summer Library Program 2012 Teen Summer Reading manual. They had already written the scenario, given some short character sketches, and a list of the props necessary.

The manual mentioned two different ways of running the program: getting volunteers and staff to appear as the characters in the murder mystery, and then the teens that came would just be asking questions and trying to piece together what happened. Or, the teens that came could be the characters, and try to figure out which one of them had murdered the victim. We kind of blended the two ideas with a couple staff members and volunteers mixed in with our teen participants who also played some characters.

Between examining evidence, getting statements from the characters, asking questions, and accusing someone, the program took about an hour and a half and was way too much fun! The teens really got into asking other characters questions and trying to figure out which one of them had done it.

If you would like to run a similar program, you can purchase scripts and character lists from MyMysteryParty.com, or you could get a hold of me and I could most likely share more information about the script and characters that we used =D

Tic-Tac-Toe Robots and a Demolition Derby

Something that we've done a couple summers in a row now is LEGO Robots. Mr. B is a local programmer, and he has fiddled with LEGO Mindstorms NXT Robots in his spare time. He has been good enough to develop a couple programs that he started presenting at the Hayden Library each summer, and the programs have spread to a couple other local libraries as well =D

With the success of the LEGO Robots program we had our first summer, we have expanded it to two programs, each presented two times in the same day. The two programs this year were "What is a Robot? with Demolition Derby" and "What is Binary? with Tic-Tac-Toe Robot."

Each program started with a powerpoint that gave a brief overview of the topic, and then the participants had a chance to assemble the robots and see how they worked. During the Demolition Derby, four robots scored points by activating touch sensors on the other machines, and during the Tic-Tac-Toe, two LEGO brains were attached to a LEGO crane that would move your pieces to where you wanted them. Mr. B had programmed the robots ahead of time (it takes a long time to work it all out), and they worked like a charm.

In addition to the fun of seeing LEGO Robots do things on their own, the participants had a chance to learn more about the computer technology that surrounds them. 

These programs are hugely popular because the robots themselves are amazing, and because Mr. B does a great job putting them together. Thanks!

If you would like to know more, you can visit Mr. B's website, legomyrobo.com.

Zombie Prom!

On a Saturday night after the library closed, a rare strain morphed teenaged patrons into brain-eating, make-up put oning, Thriller dancing zombies!

As everyone knows, zombies eat brains because they don't have any of their own, and a delicious way to do this is Jell-O. I took some foil, creased and folded it into a brain looking shape, and put it into a muffin tin. Just add some Jiggler recipe style Jell-O, and you're set.

Adding some red food coloring to pink lemonade makes a tasty blood juice, and dipping pretzel rods into melted chocolate with some almond bark at the ends make for some edible fingers =D

After some munching it was time to zombify ourselves! There were five effects we went for: whited-out faces, dark eyes, rotting flesh, messed-up hair, and blood.

If you buy some Ivory colored foundation and some dark eye shadow, you get some deathly looking skin with sunken eyes. For girls, tease your hair out, and for guys, mess it up!


You can do rotting flesh two different ways. Mix about equal parts of flour and corn syrup into a sticky paste, put it on your skin, and then press some toilet paper onto it. This becomes a "skin" you can tear, and also looks like rotting skin.

Another way to get the rotting skin look is to mix up flour, corn syrup, corn starch, and water, and apply it to your skin. Mix in the different ingredients until it starts to clump onto your skin. Start with your corn starch and if it's too runny, add some flour, or if it's too sticky, add some corn syrup.

Once you have all this "make-up" applied, add a generous amount of blood. You can mix corn syrup and flour (about two parts corn syrup to one part flour) with one drop blue food coloring and a lot of red food coloring to make a smearing, purplish blood, or use tomato paste for a clumping, red blood.

It wouldn't be much of a prom without dancing, and we thought Michael Jackson's "Thriller" would be appropriate. There is a whole series of YouTube videos that breaks down the dance step by step, and we used that to acquaint everyone with some zombie moves =D

This program was way too much fun and works well with the Summer Reading theme "Own the Night" and the upcoming Teen Read Week theme "It Came From the Library."

Creepy Scavenger Hunt =D

So the theme "Own the Night" made me think of creepy and darkness, so I thought we'd do a creepy scavenger hunt. I came up with some clues and activities, put the kids in teams of 2 or 3, and let them go at it.

In addition to a fun program, some of my questions leaned toward literacy. These questions looked like finding a book, or finding a piece of information. This was an awesome opportunity to see how much the kids knew about finding things in the library, and filling in the blanks of how to find something if they weren't very familiar with it.

If you wanted to make the program a little creepier, it would be more fun to do this at night, in a darker library, and have some creepy decorations going on. 

All in all it was a great program, and if you were wondering what my questions linked like, here is a list for you =D

What is the theme for this year's Teen Summer Reading?

One of the horror books that Rick Yancey wrote is titled...

Create your own ghost (using paper towels and a sharpie), and use it to decorate the Young Adult Section

Write down what is hidden inside the slime. (I used some cornstarch, water, and green food coloring to make my slime, and hid a plastic bug in it)

Do the solar system puzzle. (Not exactly creepy, but the kids had a fun time doing it. I originally thought of each team having to do the puzzle individually, but I thought it would take to long. So instead, I had all of the kids built it together to start the program)

Find a creepy book and write the title here

Who wrote The Monstrous Memoirs of a Mighty McFearless?

Find a creepy movie and write the title here

Find 5 creepy crawlies and right down where you found them. (I placed 10 plastic bugs across the library, just in case a few were too hard to find in a short time)

Do the Creepy Words Word Search Puzzle

Do a creepy face and have your librarian take a picture of it

Messy Experiments!

So science experiments are some of our most popular programs, and one of our most popular science experiments programs is Messy Experiments. Why? Because its awesome!

As I've mentioned before, I love Steve Spangler, and these are the ones I stole this time :)

Diet Coke Mentos Geyser

If you drop a handful of Mentos into a full 2-liters of Diet Coke, you get a fabulously sticky and awesome geyser that goes about 20 feet up! Can't stress the fun and awesomeness of this one hehe.

Color Changing Milk 

Drop some food coloring into some milk, and then dip some dish-washing soap (I use Dawn) into the milk. The milk isn't a big fan of the dawn, so the colored milk runs away from the soap. Cool stuff!

Quicksand Goo (or Oblique)

If you add corn starch and water together in the right proportions, it will be hard if you hit it, but soft if you slide through it. Awesome!

Vinegar and Baking Soda...with a twist

If you put a layer of baking soda in a container, and then drop colored vinegar onto it, it smokes and leaves a cool design. Try it! I thought this was a fun twist on the vinegar and baking soda experiments that you normally see. Got this idea from Pinterest :)

Pop Rockets

Last but not least, get some old 35mm film canisters, put some water and alka-selzer into them, and watch what happens. Experiment with changing the level of water, the amount of alka-selzer, and the temperature of the water.

Paint the Night!

So my boss's name is Miss Karen (I'd say her name is Karen Yother, but I call her Miss Karen so much more often than Karen Yother lol), and her dad's name is Donnel (for some reason we call him that instead of Don. Maybe we're just weird here hehe). In addition to being my boss's dad, he is also a local artist that just did a program for me.

Basically, we bought each participant a 9x12" canvas board, and had some acrylic paint on hand. We laid down some newspaper on the tables, passed out a small paint pallet (a paper plate works just as well if you can't find them at the dollar store), and gave everyone an inch brush and a detail brush. Donnel took the group step by step through painting a great looking night scene (we figured with a theme like "Own the Night," a night scene was awfully appropriate. The above image is a painting he did that gave him the idea for the night scene that we did).

I'm going to post some step by step pictures of the process, but I'm not saying I could paint it based on the pictures. I'm saying that having Donnel was awesome!

Our Tools

 A pencil gave us a Moon and a horizon line. 

We put some gesso putty in the moon which we'll use later.

We double loaded our brush (put one color on one side, and another color on the other side) and then brushed back and forth. The top was black and purple, we then blended in some blue near the horizon line, and then we used some green and brown for the ground. The trick is to put both colors directly on your brush and then just mix them as you paint back and forth. Gives you a great blended look.

 If you put some white paint on a toothbrush and flick it with your finger, you get some great looking stars in the sky.

Then we took our fingers and scratched the paint off of the top of the putty. That way we can see our moon again.

We added some trees (some black and mostly brown), and some purple, black, and green for the leaves. All that was left was initializing the bottom and taking a picture with a frame! 

Thanks Donnel!

Tell Your Own Ghost Story

So each year, the Collaborative Summer Library Program (representatives from each state team up to offer better and more affordable summer reading programs) chooses three themes; one for kids, one for teens, and one for adults. This year, the teen theme is Own the Night. In addition to choosing a theme, they also offer incentives and prizes and a manual full of program ideas.

One of the suggested programs was making up your own ghost stories, so I thought we'd make a program out of it by giving our older tween group (6-8 grade) some suggestions and then videotape what they came up with.

I figured that like most stories, there were certain things that a ghost story would need (who, what, where, etc.) and I wrote the questions down and some possible answers to them. I gave an answer sheet to each participant, made up my own story to show that it wasn't that bad, and then let them at it. I've posted some of the videos on my YouTube Channel, and the rest will be coming soon.

Enjoy!


P.S. Here's the questions that I asked just in case the program sounded interesting :)

Who are you? (TV reporter, Ghost survivor, local farmer)

When did you first hear about it? (Childhood, 10 minutes ago, sometime last year)

How do you know about it? (Lived through it, your friend survived it, heard it from some neighbors)

What is this thing called? (The Big Hairy, Terribleautapus, The Reptile)

When did it come into existence? (18^th century, last week, every eclipse)

How did it come into existence? (freak experiment, untimely death, no one knows)

Where does it lurk now? (an old house, graveyard, in the library)

Why should we be afraid of it? (decapitation, tickles people to death, creeps up and says boo)

Almost Camp Food: S'mores and Fire!

What kind of activities does summer bring to mind? Swimming, fishing, camping? I always think about making s'mores around a camp fire as the sun sets. 

Well, its hard to do an actual fire or sunset in the library. But, we did make s'mores on a stick, and some edible fire. We did both activities for our 3-5 grade group, but younger kids and a couple older kids were also interested in doing it.

The S'mores on a Stick recipe we used was really simple, and came from food.com. Melt some milk chocolate chips (add a little bit of shortening, so it melts right), and put it into a crock pot or fondue pot to keep it warm. Skewer a large marshmallow (we used popsicle sticks cuz we had them handy), and dip it into the chocolate. Have some graham crackers crunched up, and roll the chocolate-covered marshamallow in them. Put it on a cookie tray and put it in the fridge so it hardens. Simply awesome!

Doing s'mores on a stick didn't take very long, so we also did Edible Fire. The link is to an explanation I found. Instead of just having the kids make the fire and then eat it, the site suggested walking the kids through the making of an actual fire. Then they do the same steps to their edible fire. So get the kindling, light it with a match, add more logs, etc.

That particular explanation asks for a lot of supplies. We just used pretzel sticks, Red Hots, red licorice, candy corn, and some black licorice mounds for rocks. You can be as simple or complicated as you would like to be :)

Both activities are super simple, and the kids really had a great time with both of them!

Read some Books, Get some Prizes

So our Summer Reading programs have officially begun! Yay! We are super busy with programs, questions and handing out prizes, but we're loving it.

During the summer, we are always looking for community partners to "back us up" as it were. We've asked several of them to post promotion on their community boards or their store windows, and we also asked many of them for prize donations.

After registering for summer reading, you get a prize every time you read five hours. These prizes are ranging from book bags, to free books, to free stuff at Applebee's, to a ticket to the North Idaho Fair and Rodeo. Once you've read over twenty hours, we are entering participants into a drawing for a Sony Walkman MP3 Player, and probably some of the gift cards that our local businesses were good enough to donate to us.

So, if you like the sound of prizes for reading, check out our website for full information on summer reading for kids, teens, and adults, and visit the awesome places that support you, your library, and reading!

Never Hurts to Ask

So I was sitting down to write a blog post, and I was thinking that I didn’t have too much to write about. But, then I took a look at my calendar, and I realized I had done a whole bunch this week.

Ka-Boom was this Monday, and it was encouraging to get a full group again. Last month, we only had 4 kiddos, which kind of scared me. Do they not like the program? Did I not let people know? But, having 10 people again this month told me that last month was a fluke instead of the rule, and I like that.

We also did a slightly different set-up this time. Instead of doing a bunch of experiments, I just had some things set out, and the kids could experiment with them as they wanted to. There were some books to search through, a potato and a hammer to experiment with balance, and a microscope. Kids still seemed to enjoy it, and mixing things up is always fun.

On Wednesday I went to a workshop. The Inland Northwest Council of Libraries does an annual workshop, and this year it was on creating customer experiences. David Lee King, the Digital Branch & Services Manager at the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library (kind of a mouth full), was the presenter. He had some great ideas on using your website and your building to create a better experience for our customers; you. In addition to his great ideas, David encouraged us to think about the material being covered, so my mind was stewing on how I could take his suggestions and make them work for my library.

Another aspect of my week was promoting our summer reading programs. Last week, I sent out an email to some of my contacts at the schools, and several of them have gotten back to me on ideas to promote summer reading. I guess it never hurts to ask, because you might actually get what you ask for.

One idea was creating video spots for video announcements at the schools. For one school, I’m creating the spot, but for another school, the video production class is going to create the spot. So, to give them the idea, I got to discuss my programs with some middle school video makers on Thursday. It was exciting to be in the schools, and to know that a whole bunch of kids are going to be hearing about the programs through the announcements.

That’s about all for this week, so I’ll catch you later.

In My Boss's Absence...

Happy Friday everyone! This week is one of the reasons I like to live in North Idaho. We had snow yesterday and a fifty-degree-sunny-day today. It’s kind of ridiculous, but it keeps things interesting. 

So Miss Karen is in Arizona at a Collaborative Summer Library Program (CSLP) meeting, so I got to do some storytimes that I don’t normally get to do this week.

On Tuesday, I went down to Kootenai HeadStart, and read rain and wind stories to the kids. There are four classrooms that Karen visits, two in the morning and two in the afternoon, so I went to school in-between and did some stories on the ends.

Today was also the monthly visit from Noah’s Ark Learning Center, so I got to read some rain and wind stories again. But, this time, Miss Cassie shared some of her favorite weather books with me, and I read some awesome books based on her suggestions. My coworkers are amazing!

Also today, I sat in on the monthly Branch Managers meeting. Karen (her absence seems to be a theme this week hehe) is obviously the coordinator of Youth Services, and so she normally attends the meeting. But, when she’s away and there is still stuff to present from Youth Services, Miss Cassie and I have stepped up to the plate. I went this time because I also had a video idea to pitch to the managers. Be looking for a video similar to “Librarians on Vacation” coming out as we get closer to summer.

As far as upcoming programs go, we are having our Next-Gen Poetry Slam on April 22 at 6pm. If you aren’t familiar with Slam poetry, check out these two videos: The Most Amazing Slam Poet and Push. We are going to have three local judges, two categories (middle school, 6-8 grade, and high school, 9-12 grade), and cash prizes! Even if you don’t enjoy normal poetry, slam poetry is its own beast and shouldn’t be missed. Instead of just reading poetry, its about how you present it and getting the audience involved in your story. If you don’t want to perform a poem, at least join us for the evening. It will be a good time.

That’s about all I’ve got this week, so have a great weekend, and I’ll see you on Wednesday. 

P.S. There was a lack of Book Blurt because I’m getting toward the end of my senior research project, and tabulated a bunch of data takes a while. Sorry about not getting it out.

Disney, Murals, and Storytimes

Well, hello everyone. How was the week?

Mine went really well. I felt like a have a much better handle on the programs and events that I have coming up, and I also got to spend some time with little kids. I love it!

Just like last week, my first couple days of work were spent pondering, considering, and brainstorming upcoming programs and summer reading. Since I got a lot of ordering done for Next-Gen events last week, I had time to discuss the younger kid summer reading program this week. Even though there are still things to iron out, we have a jumpstart on summer reading now, and have the ordering finished.

Then I turned my attention to the next couple of months. I’ll start with December for this week, and I’ll let you know what’s going in January, February, and March in the next couple of weeks. As I mentioned last week, Jingle Bell Rock is going to be on Dec. 22 from 7:00-9:00pm. We’ll have some pizza, drinks, jingle bells, some holiday spirit, and any Christmas or normal songs you want to rock to! There is also some talk of having Christmas crafts available while you aren’t rocking. Because school will be out, we’re letting anybody from grades 6-12 in on the event.

Looking back on this week instead of into the future, I got to spend some time doing storytimes. Miss Cassie has a Tales for 2’s storytime every Thursday, and I got to cover for her. We read some train stories, and made some train collages. Today, I got to pop into the Kinder Center for their library times. It’s fun when kids recognize you, and enjoy reading stories with you!

In between classes, I got to talk to a local artist who is painting a mural in the Kinder Center Library. She told me about her start with Disney (back when Walt Disney was alive and would talk to his artists), all of the famous people she got to meet, and some fun details about Disneyland rides. It was also cool to see her take a rough sketch of a crab and transform it into the finished work. Today was the perfect end to a productive and great week.

Hope your week was also fantastic, and I’ll see you next week!

Library Awesomeness!

Sorry about being a couple days late. This weekend ran away from me. But, there is plenty to talk about, so here is your weekly update on Monday.

Last weekend I was chillin’ with my friends at Triple Play, and a little girl came up and gave me a bear hug. For a split second I was wondering who she could be, and then her mom gave me some context as she said something to the effect of “It must be library time.” This little girl had seen me at one of the library programs and decided to give me a hug even though we weren’t at the library. I love my job!

Another cool thing that happened this week was the Idaho Library Association’s Annual Conference. There were two amazing aspects to this conference for me. First, I got to attend a SPLAT unconference. SPLAT stands for Special Project Library Action Team. Many of the techno savvy librarians in Idaho are a part of this group, and I got to spend the morning and afternoon on Wednesday just gleaning from their knowledge and ideas. I now have plenty of websites and things to look up.

During lunch at the conference I got the pleasure of hearing Chris Crutcher speak. Chris is a well known author whose books often find themselves on banned book lists. Although I’m still wondering where I sit on having some kinds of questionable content in books, hearing Chris’s take on book banning was very interesting and worthwhile. He talked about finding the truth in a story, and bringing that across in his books. Chris was an excellent speaker, and hearing someone else’s take on intellectual freedom is always interesting.

Looking back over the week I’m realizing that I had an even busier week then I thought I did. On Thursday, I got the pleasure of going to Bryan Elementary and awarding kids their summer reading prizes. Bryan set up a special program called the Bear Necessities where kids could get prizes for reading books during the summer. The Hayden Library was one of the biggest sponsors for the program, so Bryan invited us to be a part of the award ceremony. Seeing kids get excited about a free book, and a room full of parents, teachers, and students cheering for reading was a very rewarding experience.

Lastly, the youth services staff and I filmed a promo video for our Airband Awesomeness competition, which is on October 22 from 7:00-9:00. We took “Vacation” by the Go-Gos, grabbed our blow up guitars and Curious George rulers and rocked for a good two hours! The video should be up soon, and it is going to be amazing!

Looking toward this Friday, Alysun Sanders will be joining us from 6:30-7:30. As I’ve mentioned before, she will be discussing writing, being an author, and getting published. Snacks will be provided, and Alysun is really excited to talk to all of you!

Hope you can join us on Friday, and I’ll talk to you guys later.

Another Post about Flying Time?

Another fine Friday, wouldn’t you say? I once again find it so amusing to think that another week is already over. What did I do this week? Turns out a whole bunch. Not only at work, but at my church and at my school. If I’m not at work, I’m doing homework, planning some things as the Chairperson of the Student Body Government at Lewis Clark State College-CDA, or helping with a new program at my church. Needless to say, keeping myself this busy makes the weeks pass very quickly.

Not only do I find it amazing that the weeks are passing so quickly, I’m also finding it amazing that the summer has passed so quickly. We are already to the 23rd of July. That’s weird. In about a month I’ll be starting the fall semester of my senior year at LCSC-CDA. How am I already a month away from the end of summer? Even though we’re almost through July, we have some fun things still coming up before we kiss the summer of 2010 goodbye.

This week is the end of most of our Tween programs. I had my last Open Game Friday this morning, and our last Ka-Boom Science Experiments is this Monday. While these two programs are ending, we still have two more weeks of Tween Summer Reading. This week, we are doing Art Cards. You’re probably thinking that Art Cards could mean a lot of things. For our purposes, Art Cards are small collages that we will be making using stamps, markers, magazine clippings, and anything else we can find. A week after Art Cards, we are going to be ending our Tween Summer Reading program with a Beach Party. That means having some cooky games and some hot dogs and having a great time.

A week from today we are having our Free Concert with the CDA Rock School. If you enjoy listening to rock music in the slightest, you should be at the Hayden Library from 7pm to 9pm next Friday. Karen and I attended a CDA Rock School concert just before school ended, and it was amazing. There are some very talented young people playing classic rock tunes. Makes for a great time!

Just a couple weeks after the CDA Rock School, Whilce Portacio is coming up. I still think it is crazy that a major Marvel Comics illustrator is coming to the Hayden Library, but it is happening. Whilce will be doing a Q & A session, as well as offering some tips on getting into the comics business. You can also bring in your comic books and graphic novels for Whilce to autograph.

For the last couple of weeks, we have had a few teens come in having read 25 hours. This summer, we have been giving away prizes for reading. I knew what my prizes were for 5, 10, and 15 hours, but I have just figured out our prize for 25 hours this week. So basically this is how it works. If you read 25 hours, you get another free book, some prizes from our prize stash, and 1 ticket for our Borders Gift Card drawing.

For every five hours read over 25 hours you will get another ticket for our gift card drawing. So another ticket at 30 hours, another ticket at 35 hours, and so on. The more hours you read, the more chances you have to win. There is no limit to how many hours you can read, or how many tickets you can have in the gift card drawing.

So, there you have it. Summer might be 2/3 over, but there is still plenty of fun to have at the Hayden Library.

Learning from Mistakes

How are we doing today? As far as North Idaho goes, I think summer has finally arrived. It has actually been ninety degrees twice in the last week. Consequently, I’m going to the beach after work today.

Karen and I have been learning a whole lot about doing tween/teen programs over this first month and a half of programs. As we have never done programs for this age group before, we only have the things we’ve read and the assumptions that we have from younger programming. We are finding that serving this audience is entirely different, and we are trying to adapt our own ideas to meet your needs. New things are definitely a learning experience, and we have made some mistakes. But, we are learning from these mistakes, and are working for better library programs in the future.

This week has been filled with our usual band of suspects. Monday opened with three programs at the same time, which is what we have been doing all summer. Miss Cassie has an Every Child Ready to Read workshop, for the 3-5 age group. We also have an open craft set up where families can come anytime between 10 and 2 and make some crafts. The third program is mine, and is Ka-Boom Science Experiments. We had the chance to do a Mentos Diet Coke rocket, and we also got to make Gak. If you ever get a chance, I would highly advice doing both of those experiments. If you go to Steven Spangler’s website, he has all of the steps you will need.

Tuesday means Tween Summer Reading for me. This last week we made denim summer beach bags. We had sequence, petals, glitter glue, and buttons galore, and the bags turned out amazingly. We also had a really good turnout which is always cool.

Wednesday is our younger summer reading program, and this week we played READO, which is BINGO by any other name. Instead of numbers and letters, we did letters and different items such as bicycles, shoes, and dinosaurs. Then of course we gave away some of our summer reading prizes.

Thursday means that I get to go to Finucane Park. This was actually the first story time that I got involved in when I started working in the children’s area, and I’ve been doing it ever since. We read some frog stories and played with our parachute which is always fun.

Which brings us to today, and today we have our Open Game Friday and I’m working on getting our Ka-Boom program set up for Monday. Ka-Boom is going to be electricity experiments next week.

This past week I’ve also been busy doing some advertising. Karen made me up some new flyers, and I’ve been busy posting them at different businesses and stores (don’t worry, I asked before I put any up). I was really encouraged by how many places were willing to post information about library programs.

Well join us for Ka-Boom on Monday, Tween Summer Reading on Tuesday, which is going to be a battleship tournament, and you can also come on down for our Open Game Friday. Hope your week is filled with amazing times with friends, family, productivity, and plenty of sunshine.

Awesome Library Partners!

How is this Independence Day Weekend finding you? For the library, it has been another busy week of great programs and fun.
Can you believe that it is one day away from the Fourth of July? I still can't believe how fast June has blown by. Before we know it, it'll be August, and we'll be prepping for our fall programs. Time flies when you are having fun, and when you are really, really busy.
This week at the library, we will be making Gak and a Diet Coke Mentos Geyser at our Monday Ka-Boom Science Experiments program. The program starts at 10:30am and goes to 11:30.
At our Tween Summer Reading program on Tuesday, we will be making Summer Beach Bags using sequence, glitter glue, petals, and all other kinds of awesomeness. This program starts at 11am and goes to noon.
Lastly, we will be having our Open Game Friday where the Wii will be set up, and I'm going to grab our board games and see if we want to play those this week.
I think I need to take this time to thank some of the people that have made some amazing programs happen for us. First of all, I want to thank Tim Boal down at Lightning Comics for partnering with the Hayden Library. He has helped us on three of our programs. The first was a Yu-Gi-Oh training, the next was letting us borrow some games for our Last Friday game night, and the third was for the younger kids and was a Readng with Superman.
The next person to mention is Mark Evans at the CDA School of Woodworking. He donated twenty five wooden boat bodies, and random boat pieces that made some amazing wooden boats. One of the ideas of the program was to see which boats floated and which didn't, and most of them did. The other part of the program was making some awesome boats, and that definitley happened as well.
Another partner is the North Idaho Fair & Rodeo. If anyone eighteen years or younger who is registered for summer reading reads fifteen hours, they will get a free pass to the fair on the opening day. Great stuff!
Lastly, the Texas Roadhouse is partnering with us as well. They are giving a free kids meal to anyone who reads ten hours and is under the age of twelve. Even though this doesn't apply to everyone in our Make Waves program, it is still really cool.
At our last Ka-Boom program, Mr. B (his last name is really hard to spell) programmed Lego NXT robots and brought them in for the tweens to play with. He put a lot of time programming the robots, and creating building instructions for the robots themselves. 
Although some of the programs didn't have a huge turnout, I'm hoping that these are the beginnings of some beautiful friendships. These are just a few of the people that are partnering with us, and I'll tell you about the others as they get closer.
See you on Wednesday for a Book Blurt on Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins, and have a great Independence Day!